Contact Us

(877) 359-9179


4800 S. Croatan Highway
Nags Head, NC 27959

More

Prevention Measures at The Outer Banks Hospital

At The Outer Banks Hospital, we use preventive steps to help prevent infections and safety events from occurring while patients are in our hospital.  These individual preventive steps are grouped together and referred to as a "bundle." We rate our performance on how well our hospital complies with the preventive bundles for each safety or quality event within a given timeframe.

Select a preventive measure below:

Hand Hygiene Compliance
Preventing infections from Foley catheters (Urinary Tract Infections) 

Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Vice President and patient safety expert, Carol Haraden, PhD, comments on the power and popularity of “bundles” in improvement initiatives:

What is a bundle?  

A bundle is a structured way of improving the processes of care and patient outcomes: a small, straightforward set of evidence-based practices — generally three to five — that, when performed collectively and reliably, have been proven to improve patient outcomes. 

What makes a bundle so special?

The power of a bundle comes from the body of science behind it and the method of execution: with complete consistency. It’s not that the preventive steps in a bundle are new; they’re well established best practices, but they’re often not performed uniformly, making treatment unreliable. A bundle ties the steps together into a package of interventions that people know must be followed for every patient, every single time.

So a bundle is a list of the right things to do for a given patient?

It resembles a list, but a bundle is more than that. A bundle has specific preventive steps that make it unique. 

  • The changes are all necessary and all sufficient, so if you have four steps in the bundle and you remove any one of them, you will not get the same results. This means the patient won’t have as high a chance of getting better. It’s a cohesive unit of steps that must all be completed to succeed. 
  • The preventive steps are all based on randomized controlled trials, called Level 1 evidence. They’ve been proven in scientific tests and are accepted and well-established. A bundle focuses on how to deliver the best care — not what the care should be.  
  • The changes in a bundle are clear-cut and straightforward; they involve all-or-nothing measurement. Successfully completing each step is a simple and straightforward process. It’s a “Yes” or “No” answer: Successfully implementing a bundle is clear-cut:  “Yes, I completed the ENTIRE bundle, or No, I did not complete the ENTIRE bundle.”